By Olivia Butler - Year 13, Blue Mountain College
The air was warm and muggy, carrying with it the scent of smoke and something rotten.
Reds and oranges bled across the dark sky, casting warm light over the broken city, painting the broken glass gold and red in the fading light.
Buildings that had once stretched tall to brush the sky, lay broken across the cracked tarseal.
There was nothing tall any more. Harsh winds and violent storms had laid waste to anything taller than a few metres.
He remembered when the city was tall and bright and blue.
There were trees in the streets, flowers growing in pots suspended from balconies, rivers which ran clear and cold and sparkling to the seas where people went on holiday to swim and surf and enjoy the clean sunshine.
The ground was good and green and alive.
Grass grew so thick and fast, people had to cut it back every week with noisy lawnmowers.
Everyone wore bright colours so that a crowd was a shimmering rainbow streaking through the streets.
Even when it rained and the skies turned the colour of melting snow, there were smiles and laughter, children running, splashing while their parents hurried along, their faces hidden beneath hoods and hats to get out of the drizzle.
Bright objects were displayed in every shop window, things no-one really needed but needed to buy anyway, and the windows of these shops were clean and shiny and unbroken.
Sure there were conferences and speeches made about the emissions - about how the ice was melting at rates never before seen.
There were pleas from islanders whose homes were being swallowed by the sea, and people felt sorry for them, but after a while they'd just change the channel.
Every year the weather records were broken.
The summers were hotter and drier but they didn't care. They could work on their tans all year round.
Nobody noticed the world breaking under their feet, or if they did, they'd just shrug it off.
The whole world was shiny and happy and bright.
They thought nothing could go wrong. But then it did.
They thought everything was perfect. But then they found the world wasn't so perfect after all.
There was no blue anymore - only red.
A burning, angry, hateful red that had spanned the world, polluting the seas and laying waste to the cities.
Nothing bright and happy and thriving existed any more.
Everything was red. Red sky, red ground, red dust on red clothes, red people caked in heavy red clay, fighting to bring life back to the ground, to bring back the green.
But everything stayed red and that's just the way it was.
He remembered when he could sit on a bench, content in the colours of the world.
That was before the fear invaded.
Now, sitting only brought fear of the future.
He didn't have much time left, he knew that.
He would collapse out in the dry grass and failed crops.
Other workers would drag him upright, try to distract the Big Brothers, but it would be too late.
They would see and tell him that everything was all going to be all right.
They would tell him they were taking him to a safe place where he could rest.
They would help him into the back of a truck, speaking sweet lies about rest and recovery.
He would stand and push their hands away and shout.
He would search for sympathetic faces in the muddy red sea.
But then the Big Brothers would sit him down and the truck would rumble away and he would be gone.
Tomorrow they would not remember him, not his face, not his name.
He would be lost, as the world was lost.
